Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) Study Guide

Chapter 7. Wireless Network Hacking

As part of my college capstone project back in the late 1980s, I interviewed an Air Force colonel—the communications commander of the base in Germany where I was stationed. We had a great conversation about the future of networking and data communications, and one thing in particular he said has stuck with me. He flipped the light switch on and off and said, “This is where networking is going…and where it needs to be.” He went on to explain that, in his view, networking would soon no longer be a luxury but a necessity, something people would take for granted, like electricity.

Keep in mind the timeframe here before you start laughing. This was the late ’80s, and while networking was real and beginning to raise its virtual head in day-to-day life, it hadn’t exploded into the all-encompassing behemoth we know today. At the time that statement was a true shift in paradigm—something that, to a wide-eyed young airman anyway, seemed so far off in the future we may as well have been talking about flying cars. But of course, he was dead-on correct, and probably more so than he even knew. If you’d been there and told us that wireless networking would fill that bill, we would’ve both probably laughed you out of the room. Today, though, wireless is that ever-present, always-on, taken-for-granted service we all just expect to be there and ready. Want proof? Used to be if you invited people over to your house for more than an hour’s stay, they’d comment ...